Learner profiles#

Janet - Researcher#

Janet is a researcher in an ambitious group. While primarily a wet-lab scientist, Janet shares her time between the lab and the computer where she performs data analysis. After a couple of years, the code used for the analysis was baptized and the group decided to publish it. As Janet only had some basic training in programming she worries that her code may have problems. A colleague suggested her to start by creating a Software Management Plan. After creating the SMP for her code, Janet now understands what she needs to do before publication for her code to be useful and usable to/by others.

Marc - Group Leader at Company#

Marc is a junior group leader in a pharmaceutical company. For many of the routine computational analysis in the group, software developed over a decade is being used. Most of the software was developed internally with code contributions from different developers over the years. The company is now considering converting the software into a product to be made available to insterested buyers. In order to better understand how to transform the software into a product, Marc was incentivized to elaborate a Software Management Plan. Creating an SMP provided a better understanding of compatibility of different licenses with a commercial model, the importance of testing and product quality control, ensuring the software produces reliable and replicable results for final users.

Thomas - Project Manager#

Thomas is a project manager at a small non-profit research organization. Three of the projects he’s managing have produced significant amounts of data that now require analysis. He is familiar with different aspects of project management but not software management. His line manager recommended that he would complete a Software Management Plan for a ficticious software in order to get familiar with some of the language and terms used. While completing the SMP, Thomas found many of his questions answered and felt better equipped to manage the software component of his future projects.

Rose - Software Engineer#

Rose is a trained software engineer with several years of programming experience. She is familiar with most software development best-practices, including versioning, testing and continuous integration (CI), as well as, the importance of documentation and choosing an appropriate license. She is responsible for several unpublished software projects in production for several years. In order to gain awareness of any expert blind spots and as a way to support the next cycle of funding for these projects, she decided to complete Software Management Plans for all of them. She realized she was not aware of how reproducibility became such a mission critical aspect of software use and development and was happy to find that as most of her software was automatically tested, many of the reproducibility aspects were already ensured.